I’m reading this fascinating book called Unsold TV Pilots: The Greatest Shows You Never Saw by Lee Goldberg. It’s a bit dated, for sure, but when it was free for the Kindle app on Mac two weeks ago, I grabbed it (duh, free). What I’m finding fascinating is not the list of unsold pilots, so much, as the history of pilot season, and how that animal came to be.
The reason it’s especially fascinating to me, right now, is because we’re seeing a similar evolution in web-based content, and that’s freakin’ exciting! I joined AFTRA in Atlanta in 1993 and have seen merger attempts fail (by smaller margin each time, of course) several times, ’til the merger finally went through on March 30th (oh, the champagne!) and while there’s a long road ahead, filled with details to sort out, finally we can get all on-camera performer contracts under the same roof, ending the senseless pitting of actors against one another, or against themselves, if they were dual cardholders, prior to March 30th.
See, I cast this li’l indie webseries in 2010 called Bite Me. It’s a comedic series about surviving the zombie apocalypse and I was handed a feature-film length script with clear act breaks that made it work for the web (but it could’ve just as easily worked as a feature film, or even a television series). For season two, thanks to Machinima’s monster success with this, its first-ever live action series, Lionsgate came on board and took the series to FEARnet. Yep. To television. Again, a feature film script with act breaks for web and for TV, and lots of options for growth with this project. Coverage in Wall Street Journal, LA Times, and of course the industry trades. It’s a new day for the li’l webseries making the jump to TV, and because of successes like this, there will be more.
In fact, an article I read last month talked about how Anthony Zuiker, CSI showrunner, will “premiere his next feature-length film on Yahoo… in segments.” Yeah, folks. That’s what we used to call a webseries. Now, it’s a feature film premiering online. The game has forever changed, and this history of the evolution of pilot season is one that today’s indie content providers need to review.
First, there were radio plays. Then these radio plays were adapted for television. Just like always, they were sponsored by commercial products or services. Your entertainment segment was bought and paid for by a cigarette company, a car company, whatever. But once it was clear TV wasn’t just a fad, as an entertainment content-delivery service (ahem, remember hearing that about the Internet, folks?), indie producers began developing pilots and pitching them to advertisers at what would become upfronts, and that’s how we ended up with a “film market” environment for the TV we watch today.
From Goldberg’s book:
In its infancy, television was the bastard child of the entertainment industry. The new medium, modeled after radio, was shunned by the major Hollywood studios, which saw television as a threat to their bottom line. So, the programs came from aggressive, independent producers, and the networks, all of whom pitched their series concepts directly to the advertising agencies, whose clients footed a big chunk of the pilot-production costs and ultimately decided which series would get on the air.
Network television became picture radio, adopting many of the same series and carrying on the practice of single-sponsor shows. That all changed around 1960, when several powerful forces wrestled control of television programming from the advertisers and gave it to the networks. The network chiefs had been anxious to change the power structure of commercial television for years. Sylvester “Pat” Weaver, NBC’s then president and a former advertising agency executive, believed networks should control programming and that sponsors should buy advertising time the same way they bought space in a magazine. And like a magazine, which chooses what articles it will print, a network should decide what series it will air.
Goldberg goes on to detail the quiz show scandal of the 1960s (which was the nail in the coffin of advertiser-driven programming decisions), the evolution of the MOW-style pilot presentation (which would allow for international distribution or syndicated sales of that standalone product, even if the pilot didn’t get picked up), and the development of the upfronts system that currently drives network pilot season, although to a lesser extent every year, thanks to premium cable programming and this new horse in the race: web-to-TV imports.
Hey, it’s all just beams and screens, as I’ve said before. This is the Wild West and it’s a dang exciting time. Pilot season still means, to most, “Did you go test at network to be a series regular on a hot new show from an established team?” but somewhere, every minute, indie upstarts are creating content on microbudgets with a crew of committed, talented, and forward-thinking friends who know times are changing.
So, instead of feeling like another pilot season has passed you by, if you don’t have a stack of drive-on passes from the studio lots and clearance badges from the network security gates to show for the first quarter of 2012, ask yourself if you did something that gets you closer to how things are gonna be done, moving forward.
Did you connect with colleagues who are producing their own content? Did you do some low-budget indie stuff that has a really powerful script or a super-fun hook? Did you strategize how you could create the next web darling that is a blast to do, and that could, someday, lead you tiers above, faster? Meanwhile, did you continue to work on existing episodics, building from co-star to guest star, knowing that there’s a whole population of actors being held back from working on those shows during pilot season, because they want to stay available to test at network, in the traditional model of the pilot populating process?
Look, this year is already over a quarter of the way through. Start planning for how you’re going to rock out pilot season 2013 NOW. It’s changing, slowly, but without a doubt, it’s changing. Don’t wait to see how it goes, then find yourself back here a year from now, scratching your head and wondering how you can hustle to get into the room in 2014. Right now, start developing your strategy for being a part of this revolution.
Bonnie Gillespie is living her dreams by helping others figure out how to live theirs. Wanna work with Bon? Start here. Thanks!
Originally published by Actors Access at http://more.showfax.com/columns/avoice/archives/001489.html. Please support the many wonderful resources provided by the Breakdown Services family. This posting is the author’s personal archive.